“He didn’t give it to me, it was part of my inheritance. But you are right.” I kept my voice even, my face a mask of mild surprise. Inside, I was screaming. This was worse than I thought. She wasn't just a data manipulator; she was a low-level reality warper with a side of mental editing.

  She nodded, “My power changes short-term memories, but long-term memories always develop… holes, eventually. And I apologize, I usually wouldn’t do that if I can help it.” The apology sounded genuine. Maybe she was just painfully unaware of how horrifying her ability was. Or maybe she knew exactly what she was doing.

  I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Rush, Aerosmith. They are both a couple of really friggin’ old bands I couldn’t care less about. I don’t really have any emotional attachment, since my grandpa died long before I was born, I just grabbed a bunch of stuff when I left home and this was one of the shirts.” The lie came easily. My grandpa had been a huge Rush fan. I’d loved the man. This shirt was one of the few things I had left of him that Crystal hadn’t somehow convinced me to sell. The fact that she’d touched that memory, however superficially, made me want to vomit.

  Mindy looked confused, “Wait, when you say a band tee shirt, you mean like… an original concert shirt?”

  I nodded, “Yeah.”

  She rolled her eyes, “You know those are worth like… thousands of dollars as collectors items?”

  I shrugged, “I’ve been wearing it for years. It’s not exactly holy, but it’s not out-of-the-bag untouched either. It’s probably worth about twenty bucks, which is how much it would cost me to replace it with another tee shirt.” I was actively fighting the urge to check the label with my microkinesis to see what the molecules actually said.

  Abbey looked confused, “But I thought you could repair stuff, right?”

  “Right?” I said, my voice tight.

  “So why don’t you just repair it to mint condition, and then sell it?”

  Mindy had her hand over her mouth and was sort of snorting, laughing I guess. Right. Yet another case of me coming up with brilliant ways of flexing my powers for complex villainous schemes while utterly missing the most obvious, legal, and financially solvent potential uses. I could stage a multi-thousand-dollar battle with a hero but hadn’t considered the vintage t-shirt market. My life was a joke, and the universe was the punchline.

  “Because…” I thought about it for a few minutes, the sheer absurdity of the situation washing over me. “Because I didn’t think about it?”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Mindy looked at me suspiciously, “She has a good point. I mean, you are kind of broke, right? I am sure your old job paid pretty well, but it couldn’t have been that great. Why didn’t you head to a junk shop or a dump and just start finding stuff, fixing it, and then reselling it online? Or you could have made a mint restoring artwork or even old VCR tapes and hard drives so that their data can be recovered. I bet that the BSA would pay you your weight in silver if you could crack a hard drive that’s been reformatted and zeroed out.” She was right. I’d been so focused on the high-risk, high-reward world of villainy that I’d ignored a dozen safer, smarter ways to make a living. It was the kind of shortsightedness that got guys like me killed or, worse, enrolled in remedial classes.

  “I don’t know if I could do that, the hard drive thing, but I might be able to fix an old VCR tape or cracked CD… my repair isn’t that awesome.” It was a weak deflection, and we all knew it.

  I used a little of my newfound energy to quickly reset my brain. Yeah, it’s confusing, don’t try this at home, but I could actually see the fading spirit particles where my short-term memory had been changed, a faint psychic scar tissue, and suddenly remembered putting on my Rush tee-shirt this morning, and yes, she had been wearing a green sweater. The violation was confirmed. She’d reached into my head and tweaked my reality without my permission.

  “Please don’t do that again.” I said, my voice dropping its friendly pretense, leaving it cold and flat. “That’s kind of invasive.” It was the understatement of the century.

  “Oh!” she said, feigning surprise. “Okay, I fixed it. I promise.”

  I looked down my hoodie and the Tee-shirt was Rush again, and it had always been Rush. With another minor twitch, I remembered that it had been Aerosmith a few seconds ago. The whiplash was nauseating.

  “That’s matter manipulation. That’s sort of a big deal.” I stated, watching her carefully.

  She shook her head, downplaying it with a practiced ease. “It’s not big enough scale to be a big deal, I guess, and I have so many restrictions. It has to stay within expectations, and it can’t affect other people physically… like I couldn’t turn you blonde. Something about other people, especially alphas, makes it not work. And staying within expectations means I couldn’t like… turn your tee-shirt into solid gold, or even a more modern band’s shirt. It’s a sub-power of data manipulation, after all. That’s why I am training for support.” A list of restrictions designed to make her seem harmless. I didn’t buy it for a second. Expectations could be manipulated. Data could be corrupted.

  “So here’s a question,” I said, shifting to the practical, because the philosophical was too terrifying to dwell on. “if that bathroom selfie picture was on a screen or a printout, and someone took a picture of that screen, would that picture disappear too?”

  She shook her head, “I don’t think it would. It’s not contiguous. Just like if they put it on a hard drive and flew to Japan with it… the range is way too far.”

  I suddenly felt a lot better. Not good, but better. Matter manipulation and mental manipulation were both scary powers, even if, in her case, it was very limited. Knowing there were limits, however flimsy, gave me something to work with. She was a threat, but perhaps a manageable one. For now.